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Summary

Ontology

Ontology is the naming and categorisation of reality, or that which is. Pluralising it to ontologies aligns with post-positivist insights into the multiple and contingent conditions of reality. Ontological statements, including classifications, about what is draw on how we think we know (see entry on ‘Epistemology’). Each of these two concepts requires and shapes the other. For example, an epistemological approach that draws on material semiotics ‘argues that the practice of relations shapes and forms the actors caught up in them’, that ontological realities ‘are done in practices’ (Law and Singleton, 2014, p 384, original emphasis) or enactment. Since different actors engage in different practices, this means that in material semiotics, what might have been thought of as an ontologically singular entity or phenomenon from a positivist perspective, is instead necessarily plural. This is compounded by the insight that even over little time, the context within which practice takes place also changes, which in turn produces new realities. That which is, or the ontological object, can never be singular in material semiotics and similar epistemologies. This multiplicity goes beyond the interpretive, where it is understood that a single event will be experienced and interpreted in many ways that themselves acquire an ontological status; it suggests that what is being interpreted is already ontologically multiple.

Asking what education policy is may consequently be seen as a more ontologically challenging and politically charged question than it at first appears, bringing to the fore issues including reality versus representation. That is to say, policy-as-relational-practice (social reality) and policy-as-text (representation) are ontologically more imbricated than they are identical, and it is evidence of power functioning effectively and teleologically to have them understood as reducible to one another, and/or as the text having privileged status over embodied practices.

The power to impose ontological understandings of what policy is constitutes a power over reality, including how subjects make sense of themselves, and so ontological framings are simultaneously largely implicit in policy and policy studies and also fundamental to the creation and reproduction of epistemic paradigms, their communities and claims.